I struggle to get qeue procressing via throtteling work. I have read the manual and also went through countless threads regarding this but the answers are mostly not in simple English (meaning its hard for a non-techie to understand) and i feel its based on the assumption that i already knew certain stuff.

Can somebody please be so kind enough to clear the following up for me.

1 When I set up throtteling ( Amount of emails/in amount of time/amount of throttled seconds), do i manually start the cron job or does it start on its own after i send campaign?

2 Do i need to set the time of the cron job exactly the same as MAILQUEUE_BATCH_PERIOD in my config file.

3 What will be the cron settings for 15 minutes. (no scheduling)

Thanks in advance. I'm sure these are answered many times but can somebody just please "dumb down" it for me.

1) Yes you need to schedule the cron job through your hosting control panel. phplist does not have any knowledge of the cron job.

2) No.When processing the queue with a cron job the batch period is not really important. The batch period is used to ensure that no more than batch_size emails are sent in that period. But that is more applicable when processing the queue in the browser. When using a cron job you can ensure that the hourly send limit is not breached using the cron job frequency and the batch size.

I usually set the batch period to a small number, say 10s.I then either run the cron job every 10 minutes with a batch size of the hourly rate/6 and a throttle of 1sor do not use batch processing (set batch size to 0) and set the throttle to 3600/hourly rate

1 Yes, i know. Phplist lets me set up the cron job on install. What i want to know is once i set up a campaign ans send it , does the cron then automatically kicks in.How will i know it started.I'm getting confused there. Does the cron just start the process, stop it and then start it again and the throttling is handled by my config settings.

2 Now i'm getting more confused, sorry. Can you give me an example based on the following:Hourly limit of server is 500, but i want it to set to 400Would like to space the emails with 2 or more seconds.Having a cron running every 15 minutes

You might not be understanding it fully.The cron job runs periodically to run the phplist processqueue command. If the phplist processqueue command is already running then the new one simply exits and does nothing. Otherwise it starts to send any campaign that is ready to be sent.

If you have set the batch size then phplist will send that number of emails and then stop. If you have not set the batch size then phplist will run until all emails have been sent.

So if you are limited to sending 400 emails/hour and want to run the cron job every 15 minutesset the batch size to 100.set the batch period to a small number, say 10, as it is not that important.set the throttle to a small number, say 2s.on your hosting control panel, set the cron job to run every 15 minutes

Then phplist will send a batch of 100 emails every 15 minutes. The actual sending will take maybe 250s, then phplist will exit.You can check the progress on the Campaigns page, or view the event log page where phplist logs what it is doing.